In the last days of summer, the beach was no longer the same as in my descriptions. Maybe writing erodes too, in the end it’s ink on paper, matter on matter, you know this better than I: a body tends to displace any other body that occupies its space, words end up crushing the silence, and that’s why I write you; in the end I’ll make that which has no body triumph over that which does, and that is the story, the ostentatious sentences that prevent me from immediately beginning to tell you about my last weeks in Neutria.
I hate your foul-smelling flesh and love remembering when you supported the full weight of your body on top of mine. But no. The night extends outside, in the ugly Santiago streets that resound louder and louder, telling me: you’ll never say anything to anyone, your words will be cups, but not cups full of water for the thirsty — your time is running out and the night is long — but cups that slip from your hands and begin their fateful fall; this notebook transcribes the precise instant that the cup is suspended in the air before turning to dust on the ground. It won’t be transcendence I attain but silence, because I can’t comprehend the way I scratched out, the slaps you put up with in the name of our love — while I wept, begging your forgiveness on a dark and disappeared Neutrian street, bending down to unbutton your pants, but you took a quick step backwards and I, humiliated, mocked your pseudo-Corporalism — the brevity of that memory that in my notebook takes up no more than three words — blow, tears, insult (and before it had been so lovely, when you brought me home in a taxi, we were coming from the university, we’d had our first kiss in the library, a one-second kiss, just lips, I was scared and I felt a wave of blood in my neck, a powerful heartbeat, but a heartbeat) — stays with me so I live it over and over again, breaking up.
Will a wondrous thing that occurred only once — and all too quickly — make sense again when it’s repeated ad infinitum? You decide, you’ve already received these pages, if I am now in eternity or simply in the lines of a novel, as a person, as a persona, as a model; you decide if I die with you in the moment you stop reading me. Who more than you, the Corporalist, would long for our bodies to stay, touching each other, in these pages. Fleetingly me, because I can’t write you letters from the beyond or the rottenness, I prefer to call it the triumph of silence — not eternity — so that you forget what I’m saying and stay with my body, so that you put what there is to put where it is missing.
In the last days of summer, the beach was no longer the same as in my descriptions. Maybe writing erodes too — you tell me, you’re the one who writes. The couple who had come to occupy the center of my picture stopped appearing, walking right to left across the sand, their movements slowing down before they disappeared altogether, and then my sentences could only repeat the landscape, a wave breaking over a wave breaking over a wave breaking over a wave breaking over a wave breaking. The ekphrasis retreated like the undertow, the picture yielded and there appeared multiple glimmers I’d never seen before, and would never see again: the shape of the wave — breaking in dozens of movements that I could scarcely individuate, much less reduce to the word ocean, because they came and went — disappearing like all the water that falls on you when you go under.
I went home shivering. The experiment had exploded in front of my face, the ekphrasis had revealed itself and I’d been unable to write it. Alicia consoled me when she said my tears confused her, that there was no way to know if my writing had succeeded or failed. Looking me in the eyes, she asked me to let her do a final session, that, in her schoolgirl handwriting, I let her do a final description of the black beach, and then I could keep the results if they seemed useful. I accepted.
The next day, Alicia walked eleven steps in a straight line past the kiosk toward the ocean, she sat down and did her best to find the exact words to describe each wave until they came to form a single wall of water that broke without ever ceasing to break, immobile in the moment that the foreign couple approached, walking along the beach. They looked exhausted; he rolled up his pants and she sat down and looked out at the sea without saying anything. Behind them, Alicia — dressed in a black dress and dark sunglasses as if acting out the joke she’d made: this seems like a job for a private detective — started unsuccessfully to write down every gesture the couple made: she lifts her hand and touches his mouth, brushing away a stain on his face that looked like sand, but then it’s darker — her finger’s shadow, I suggested, but Alicia raised her voice to tell me no; it’s a minute drawing in black pencil — and he’s unfazed when she skillfully draws lines on his face, so quickly that he doesn’t even discover the pencil against his cheek until she stops, she kisses him and says something in his ear.
You know, Alicia says to me, the two of us trying to fix movement using words and she, the cunt, adds a drawing to our picture, three lines — the sand, the waves, and the horizon — and two points — the sun high on his face and an unknown figure moving off down the beach. That slut ruins our chance to halt what’s spinning in circles, vibrating, shaking, ending up on the page convincing us that, nevertheless, the world that falls on top of us can also be suspended. Sky, sand, sea, wave cease falling; they stay still around us and we’re able to sit on the sand, dive into the sea, ride the wave, never lose sight of the stars that begin appearing in the sky, and in this way we save Neutria. You know, yells Alicia: that little bitch isn’t stupid like us; she draws, tattoos, marks the body she adores with a figure that doesn’t change, and no one will ever even turn these pages. Then the couple heard our voices. Their eyes turned curiously toward me, and I could clearly make out their faces; perhaps you can guess whom they resembled. Every morning you went with me to walk on that beach, that day you heard a shout behind us, you saw me walking toward the kiosk and also returning home with the notebook under my arm, looking calm, though in truth we ran at full speed, Alicia and I, laughing. She chided me in a low voice: but that’s the boy from the university, the one writing the novel, the one who stares at you in class. You were with him every morning, you little minx. I’m jealous, why didn’t you tell me?
THE NOVEL
Elisa came back with two cheap popsicles. Carlos removed the wrapper on his and they ate it together. The other popsicle melted after a few hours on the bench in the plaza where they spent the afternoon. Elisa lay her head down across his knees and without intending to she fell asleep. A while later the cold woke her. It wasn’t Carlos’s knees that she felt under her head, but a jacket, his jacket, shaped into a pillow. Just before opening her eyes she’d believed she was in bed, but the bench’s boards materialized and she remembered where she was. Another false alarm she said to herself, just like when she was little and stayed at her cousins’ house in Viña de Mar: she thought she was waking up in her own room in Santiago, but then she heard breathing, the sea in the background, and her Aunt Pepa coming up the stairs to wake them for breakfast. For a second — before discovering that Carlos had left her alone, sleeping in the plaza — she thought that, like before, she’d been mysteriously transported to some hostile place in middle of the night. Nearly desiccated trees, poorly pruned shrubs, the gardener hosing down the street, and the old man pretending to read the paper but actually ogling her, all of it added to her disappointment.